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REVIEW: BattleSouls

MOBAs have never been a type of game I liked; it’s not one specific thing, it’s just the entire bundle doesn’t appeal to me. Excluding this game, the only one I’ve played is League of Legends, which I only played 3 or 4 games of, and I only adequately enjoyed my experience. BattleSouls, however, is nowhere near as enjoyable as League of Legends was.

Status: Released

Developer: Pixeleap

Publisher: Pixeleap

Genre: Online Multiplayer Action

Release date: 12 May, 2016

Type: Multi-player (supports cross-platform)

I’m not a graphics focused person when it comes to games, but I like to give credit where credit is due. The graphics in BattleSouls are very nice to look at. It certainly isn’t as graphically intensive as most current-gen games, but it has a bright choice of colors that contrast well with each other.

Unfortunately, I prefer gameplay over graphics, and this game is lacking heavily in that department. The game itself is simple, there’s an object in the center of the map that both teams can capture, and once one team captures the object, they can go to the enemy’s spawn and attack their crystal until they lose the center object. Destroy the crystal three times and you win. Unfortunately, doing this gets old very quickly, especially against bots. This is a MOBA, so just play with other people, I hear you saying.

The problem though is that literally nobody plays this game. I browsed the server list several times and never once did I find a server with even a single person on it. This wouldn’t be a problem if the bots were at least competent, but frankly, calling them Artificial Intelligence would be a lie because that would imply they have any intelligence whatsoever. Bots have multiple problems; they all play the same character, they can’t aim their attacks, their only strategy is to rush the center object then rush the crystal, with the character that can teleport, if you teleport they forget you even existed. There are just too many problems with them to list, but ultimately it all leads to one thing. They’re not a challenge.

There is not a lot of variety right now. Many maps look very similar, and have almost no variation to the actual layout. You start in a castle, there’s grey road, there’s green grass. I have now described what every map looks like. There’s a castle on both sides of the map, and a crystal in the center, and roads that connect the crystal to the castles. I have now described the layout of all the maps. The only variation in the map seems to be where the special item spawns and how you get to it, and the special item itself isn’t even that important, despite what I’m calling it.

There are only six characters, which would be understandable if it weren’t for the fact that this is a MOBA game. You’re allowed to take three of them into the battlefield and switch between them with a small cooldown between switching. All characters have 2 attacks and something called a “Switch Ability” which activates when you switch to that character. Switch Abilities range from “Never cared about “ to “Useless”. When I convinced my friend to play the game with me he asked me what the point of Switch Abilities was and roughly the exact thing I told him was “You don’t need to worry about them, they’re useless.”

The animations are very… “weird”. It’s really something I don’t know how to describe, because I don’t want to call them “bad” because they really aren’t, but I don’t want to call them good either, because they also aren’t good. They just seem inhuman, and wrong in a very strange sense. It’s not an easily described thing, you’d have to watch them to understand, but just imagine that these characters were aliens trying to move like humans and they were only doing a sort of good job on the surface, but deep down something just seems a little wrong and you can’t point out exactly what that wrong thing is. That’s how I’d describe the animations.

There really isn’t even that much game in general. 6 characters that each have two attacks, 4 or 5 maps that all look very similar, an objective that never changes between maps. Steam says it isn’t in early access, but it definitely gives off the early access vibe.

Overall, BattleSouls is a game that I simply wouldn’t recommend. My friend and I had fun laughing at some of the weirder things we found in the game, but other than that, we weren’t entertained from the actual game.